The Multi-Pronged Importance of "Hunchback"

Saou Ichikawa's Daring Novel of Disability and Sexuality Deserves Its Praise

Japanese and English Language Editions of Hunchback

When I learned that the 2023 Akutagawa Prize—which in Japanese literature occupies a space between the Pulitzer and the Nobel—was awarded to a severely disabled novelist for the first time, I took notice. When I was growing up in Japan in the 1960s and 70s, physically disabled people—apart from old people with canes and a few WWII amputees begging in train stations—were rarely seen in public. They were conspicuous by their absence, and even as a child I knew where they were: at home or in institutions, invisible to society. Conformity played a part in their isolation, but a larger reason was practical: accessibility was non-existent in Japan at that time. For those who couldn’t walk or climb stairs, public transportation, schools and most buildings were off limits. In all my years in Tokyo, I never saw a person who used a wheelchair—not one.

All of this began to change because of demographics, as Japan’s aging population demanded accommodations in public places. I started noticing the changes in the early 2000s, when stations were retrofitted with elevators and chair lifts, curbs were flattened, and railings appeared on shrine and temple stairs. As a result, Japan today has far better accessibility than the UK or Europe but doesn’t match the United States, where accessibility was achieved by federal law only in 1992. Given the absence of a Japanese version of the Americans With Disabilities Act, notable gaps still exist. This spring in Japan, eight months after knee replacement surgery, I started carrying a stick again, months after abandoning it at home. Each time I wondered if this was necessary, I’d find a staircase with no railing or a train track that was accessible only by stairs, and realize I still needed it.

Saou Ichikawa, who burst onto the literary scene with her superb novel Hunchback, is too disabled to travel by train, let alone manage any stairs. She had to leave school in junior high, when her congenital myopathy made classroom learning impossible. Because Ichikawa would be confined to home for life, her parents built a house on the Kanagawa coast so that she could see the ocean. Despite her dependence on a motorized wheelchair and ventilator, she managed to write fiction and complete a college degree at Waseda, one of Japan’s top universities. Her efforts culminated in Hunchback, a novel that crackles with energy, humor, and lust.